The Stone Grinder..

With about two more weeks left before our new MacIntyre conche refiner shows up on our doorstep from Scotland we're both busy wrapping up a lot of finishing touches at the shop. Lots of beans are arriving, Bryce is carving out our wrapper art press, bulk bar packages are being developed, signs are being designed, refrigeration getting sorted..the list goes on and on. In the meantime we've also gotten ourselves a stone grinder from 'ol Mexico. The reason we decided to do an initial grind before concheing is so instead of putting whole cocoa nibs staright into the conche with the other ingredients we can first grind down the nibs to a liquid. This will, in effect, lower the amount of stress on the conche. We also think that keeping in step with southern artisan chocolate making that nothing but a natural stone initial grind is order. It's yet another amazing (and simple) machine and will give us yet another device to tinker with until the conche arrives.

The molds have arrived..

We've just received our new molds and I have to say we're rather pleased with them. You'd be surprised the amount of choices one has to make to settle on them! Length? Width? Depth? Shape? Break off tabs? No break off tabs? You get the picture. We just decided to keep it simple and classic with our logo embedded into each tab on the mold.

In other important news - we've decided to move on from our first conche refiner (and the gremlins that plagued it) which we used for about twenty minutes before its untimely demise. However, we have moved on to bigger and better things. Our new MacIntyre 250KG batch conche refiner is far superior to our previous machine. This guy does about five times as much as the last one so we'll definitely be able to grow into it. It also weighs two and three quarter tons so if you want to help us unload it you can come on over. Word is that we'll be receiving it at the end of this month. Once it's hooked up everything will be in place!

Cocoa Bella 2009

While we're patiently waiting for our industrial conche refiner to be repaired we took part in an annual benefit south of Nashville in Columbia, TN called Cocoa Bella that showcased different artisan chocolate from around the world. As the sponsor of the event we were on hand to talk about the how cocoa is harvested and fermented then the journey it makes once within our production facility - from roasting to tempering. We even brought a limited amount of our signature chocolate (64%) and the smaller lab equipment that we made it on so we could demonstrate some of the actual process in person. Other than our chocolate we were featured in a tasting along side the likes of Valrhona Guanaja 70% and Côte d’Or Noir de Noir 54%. There was also a milk chocolate tasting that featured Green & Black's 34%, a Sharffen Berger 41% and Michel Cluizel Mangaro 50%. We had a great time chatting with everyone and explaining exactly what it is we do. We also took the opportunity to introduce a chcolate tea that we've been tinkering on at our lab. It's mighty good!

In other news we are still in the process of getting our conche refiner fixed. We are quite close and will be up and running soon. We thank you for your patience!

Needed: Conche Exorcist!

So there's been a lot of development in the long road to getting Olive & Sinclair off the ground over the past month. Approvals from government agencies, logo designs, wrapper designs, cocoa bean roasting and lots and lots of testing. Obviously priority one is developing an amazing chocolate to provide you all with - and that certainly takes patience and time.

The one issue that's delayed our production is a lemon of a conche refiner (the one we put cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, sugar and other yummy things into and grind them all down) that we're working on getting straightened out as soon as possible. Fortunately all of our other equipment is rock solid and once our cocoa refiner has been replaced we'll be back in the saddle and sprinting toward our opening date. In the meantime we're still very hard at work in the testing stages and taking great care that we're going to satisfy your hand made chocolate needs and become Nashville's own southern, artisan chocolate makers.

As I mentioned previously we're very proud to have a completed logo and nearly completed packaging thanks to the guys over at the Anderson Design Group - and I got hand it to them - they're top notch and have a heck of an eye for what we've been envisioning over the past months. I think it's certainly safe to reveal our new logo right now as we really can't sit on it any longer. We want to assure you that neither of us can wait to get our chocolate creations out to you and are terribly excited to hear back what you think!